Trigger alert: I couldn’t care less if there is an Islamic consensus on the question of whether it is halal or haram for Mohammed to be depicted in visual art. In this, I am confident that I am expressing the American consensus — although, admittedly, not the consensus of university administrators and managers, who now outnumber both academics and students.
The point is relevant thanks to one of these Commissars of Woke named David Everett, who serves as “Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence” at tiny Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. In early November, Everett branded an art-history professor “Islamophobic” for displaying a 14th-century painting of Islam’s prophet to her class in the course of quotidian instruction. In short order, the professor, Erika Lopez Prater, was on the receiving end of more bile from another Jacobin, dean of students Patti Kersten, who decried her “act of intolerance.” Professor Lopez Prater was duly canceled, which in this case means terminated from her employment, because — as Everett and Hamline president Fayneese Miller put it in an email to staff — “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”
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